A swing and a miss for Wrigley Field renovation plans

The triangle lot along Clark Street at the west side of Wrigley Field.

The triangle lot along Clark Street at the west side of Wrigley Field. (Brian Cassella, Chicago Tribune)

Cheryl Kent Special to the Tribune

Wrigley Field had it right from the start. An urban ballpark close to public transportation and holding around 40,000 people is the winning ticket. Wrigley may be battered but, as it approaches its centenary, it is still authentic.

So, with this real treasure, it is strange to see plans from the Cubs that would undermine Wrigley's best, enduring qualities by cocooning it in a suburban design and by fudging the line between what's real and what's not.

Apart from renovating Wrigley Field, a protected city landmark, the Cubs propose to build a mixed-use office and retail structure on part of a triangular plot bordering the west side of the stadium. The balance of the triangle would be turned into a plaza. Across Clark Street, connected by a pedestrian bridge, the Cubs want to build a seven-story hotel that would include restaurants and parking.

The plan addresses an intermediary zone between some charming residential areas, Wrigley Field and some mid- to low-end businesses (like an awful lot of bars and T-shirt joints) that mostly appear to live off Wrigley and the Cubs.

Clearly, the Cubs want to harvest the cash being gathered in their name by the neighbors, including the rooftop owners. There's nothing wrong with that, especially when the area is being upgraded in the process. They are also after advertising revenue. The buildings and plaza designs bristle with signage.

Done right, the Cubs' plan takes a chewed-up stretch of Clark Street and remakes it into an attractive zone, useful year-round and serving the entire neighborhood.

Proposing to get rid of two surface parking lots is a great start. Indeed, the Cubs deserve credit for the breadth and ambition of their plan. It could be transformative.

The new plaza could, as the Cubs say, become a kind of public square, perhaps with a farmers market in the summer and an ice rink in the winter. That sounds very appealing and like a real contribution to the community.

The trouble is the Cubs are also pitching a plan for a kind of baseball theme park that pretends to authenticity while proposing to damage the integrity of the real deal: Wrigley Field. The Cubs want Ye Olde Baseball Mall, except with a Jumbotron and a rival entryway to the stadium.

The scale and size of the proposed hotel and mixed-use buildings are good. They will fit in without overwhelming the neighborhood. But the designs affect an embarrassing historicism, presumably meant to evoke the early 20th century when Wrigley was constructed.

It's no use pretending the rest of the 20th century has not happened and the 21st has not begun. Indeed, one of the things the 20th century put an end to was the affordability of well-crafted and executed architectural design details of the sort these buildings propose to emulate. Instead of real stone, the architects have specified "cast stone," or, in other words, molded cement. That fools nobody.

There are many gifted, imaginative architects producing work that is sophisticated, contemporary, urbane, widely appealing and polite to its neighbors.

Consider architects Krueck & Sexton and the beautiful and glassy Spertus Institute they inserted into the historic district of Michigan Avenue near Louis Sullivan's majestic 1889 Auditorium Theatre building. Consider John Ronan Architects' Poetry Foundation building, which has redeemed a formerly dismal corner at Dearborn and Superior streets. Consider Studio Gang and the whimsical vaulted pavilion it piloted onto the grounds of Lincoln Park Zoo in 2010.

Then consider a failure that followed the Cubs' new-is-old strategy. There is the deeply lousy faux-historical Ritz Carlton Residences at 664 N. Michigan Ave. standing cheek-to-cheek with the actually historic and graceful Farwell Building that the tower's developer was obliged to save. Adjacency does not flatter the new high-rise.

The Cubs could build in a contemporary vocabulary, coordinating the designs for its proposed structures to create a harmonious relationship between them. The point is: Why do something banal when you could do something amazing?

Conceptually, the Cubs' urban design plans are a mashup of thinking about architecture and urban planning from the 1970s and 1980s that does not apply to Chicago nor the area around Wrigley Field.

The proposal is modeled after the "festival marketplace" approach launched in Boston with the renovation of historic Faneuil Hall as Faneuil Hall Marketplace by Benjamin Thompson in 1976. In a series of legendary projects, including work on Navy Pier in the mid-'90s, Thompson enticed people to visit the cities by promising safe, orchestrated experiences, with an emphasis on charm over authenticity and spontaneity.

In time, and as cities regained cachet, the marketplace approach came to represent a suburban take on cities that downplayed genuine urban diversity and vitality while assuming a defensive, apologetic crouch when it came to design.

Thompson was brilliant and a visionary, producing work more nuanced than subsequent formulaic applications reflect. But his work was driven by a condition that has disappeared — white flight to the suburbs. The planned renovation of Navy Pier, intended in large part to downplay its carnival aspects, is evidence the formula is outdated.

Today, the Thompson approach wouldn't suit Wrigleyville. While the stadium has its problems, attracting people is not one of them.

Indeed, the Cubs' plan, with its insistence on controlling the visitor's experience, shows how wrong the Thompson formula can go.

The plan's target zone is the middle of the new plaza. Everything is aimed there. A proposed west gate would open onto it, and the pedestrian bridge over Clark Street from the planned hotel would land there.

The latter is absolutely emblematic of anti-urban thinking. The bridge would lift people above the city, direct their path and set them down where the Cubs want them to spend their money and eyeball the advertising.

The problem the bridge is supposed to solve — "safety" — is nonsense. If that were the real intent, the bridge would run from the Addison "L" stop and set down in front of the main gate at Clark and Addison.

The Cubs need the city's permission for the bridge, and they should not get it. Such bridges have been allowed only in special conditions, such as connecting medical buildings, and this circumstance does not meet that standard.

The problem that the new gate is supposed to address is not phony, but the solution bears a hard look because it seems as cooked as the pedestrian bridge.

If built as proposed, the plan would draw visitors away from Wrigley's historic main entry to the retail, to the advertising, maybe over Clark Street via the bridge to the plaza and through the new gate.

The west gate design has not been submitted to the city by the Cubs for review, but an early drawing showed it with a scale and presence rivaling the main gate and exceeding the secondary entries at the other three corners of the ballpark. Ornamental metalwork reminiscent of the early 1900s frames the proposed gate. It could easily be construed as original by people who did not know the park.

The Cubs say the new gate is meant to alleviate the bottlenecks when fans are leaving the ballpark all at once at the end of a game.

That seems disingenuous. If the only purpose is to make exiting faster and easier, a modest, unobtrusive exit-only gate opened at the end of games would do the job.

Usually, there is nothing more fundamental to a structure's design than its orientation and entry. Wrigley has, apart from the main gate, secondary entrances at each corner of the ballpark. So it is possible a fifth could be added without damaging the stadium.

But it needs to be done with care and respect. It must be subdued in the way the secondary entries are now. It should not compete in design and prominence with the main gate. A nearly 100-year-old landmark should not be upended to better accommodate sales of baseball paraphernalia on the mall.

With exceptions, the proposed renovation inside the ballpark appears to be deft and respectful. Throughout, seating decks, concrete and steel supports are already being replaced. The Cubs promise the nets slung below the upper deck, intended to catch falling chunks of concrete, will not be needed after a renovation.

Facilities for the players are being expanded. Needed batting cages are being built by excavating behind the dugout. The concourse on the ground level will be expanded and opened up by tucking concessions and support space under the first deck. These are all clever moves to create needed space and use existing space to update Wrigley without damaging its character.

The Cubs propose to move the outer bleacher walls out by 10 feet, absorbing city property into a private enterprise. So far, the Cubs say they will not pay for the land.

The walls are protected by the landmark ordinance, and conceding this alteration serves no justifiable purpose. The Cubs say they need to move the walls in order to add signs and meet the terms of a contract with rooftop owners. If the walls are back 10 feet, the sightlines from the rooftops would clear the signs, the Cubs say. That is one tortured line of reasoning for altering a historic building for signs that have not been approved, as they must be, for the sake of a contract that will expire in 2023.

The Cubs would also pick up some seats and, presumably, the area to create mezzanines at the northwest and southeast corners in that deal. Potentially, moving the walls could also bulk out the corners and spoil the tapering effect of the bleachers that is fundamental to Wrigley Field's beauty and charm. It's a bad idea, and it should not be executed.

After all, the owners want fans to take the long view as the team is rebuilt. So, likewise, they should take the long view and hold off, let the contract with the rooftop owners expire and leave the walls where they are.

As for the 6,000-square-foot video screen, Wrigley's intimacy is essential to its character, and it's impossible to imagine that quality surviving a digital sign of that size. It's also hard to believe fans want such a thing. The video screen turns live baseball into collective TV watching. Don't people go to baseball games for the sensory experience of sun and breeze, baseball, an emerald field, tasty unhealthy food and the serendipity of strangers together?

The Rickettses (who own the ball club), the Cubs and their design team are taking on one of the toughest architectural problems around. They are custodians of an important, beloved ballpark that has to be respected as it is renovated. In taking on infill areas surrounding Wrigley Field, they hope to capitalize on their ownership and improve the neighborhood. It's ambitious. It's not a surprise that the first draft is off the mark.

Fortunately, the Cubs' plans for Wrigley and the area around it are preliminary, with city approval required on a range of issues, including zoning and historic preservation. There is time for review that will help get the plans where they need to be.

A useful watchword to guide the revisions is "integrity." Respect the integrity of the ballpark, respect the city's integrity — trusting that it offers sufficient rewards without getting suburbanized — and respect the integrity of our times when it comes to new design and construction.